Crossing the Line

We can’t afford a new roof!

Heather and I moved into this house with our family about 5 years ago. In fact, this is the house that I grew up in which my mom and dad built back in in 1991. In some ways it’s pretty cool to live in the house that I grew up in. I have always loved the lay out of this house growing up and Heather and I really love that it works well with our 6 person family. We like the location, the park across the street, the good sized backyard and especially love the open concept. The one thing we did not like was the roof.

The roof was coming up to being almost 20 years. It was ugly, it was falling apart and it needed a face lift. It was so bad that when it rained or was windy, the family would start praying that the roof wouldn’t fly off or that the roof wouldn’t leak. When we first moved in we got some quotes on it and it was going to cost us about $5000.00. That was and still is a lot of money to us which we did not have at the time. So, we had to figure a way how to do this and fast.

The problem is, Heather and I were not very good at managing money. I like to buy things, in fact I “really” liked to buy things. Heather always said that money seemed to burn in my pockets and I guess that was true. We started to realize that not only did we need a new roof, but we needed to learn how to manage our money.

Last year, Victory Church on the Rock hosted a financial debt reducing class called, Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey. It was a 13 week class and it showed us many things but the one major thing that we learned from it was to quit buying in credit cards and start saving and buying things in cash ONLY. It was hard to do at first. We knew that we needed a new roof and could have just put it on the credit card, but then we figured out how much that would have cost us in the end and decided to put the new plan in place. We changed the way we spent and the way we saved and a year later, we now have a new roof.

What a great feeling it has been to save, buy and new have a beautiful brand new roof…AND we don’t owe anyone any money! What a great feeling!

I also want to say a HUGE thank you to Andy for all his hard work and time sacrifices in putting the roof on. I had NO idea where to start from day one, but thankfully Andy did. Thanks Andy!